Tv Ads: Arrows In Candidates' Quivers

Candidates Use Television Ads To Take Aim At Their Opponents

March 24, 1992|By JON LENDER; Courant Staff Writer

In the past week, presidential candidate Bill Clinton has been running TV ads that include hard-hitting attacks on those who oppose him; for example, he spreads a "fraud" label that a columnist applied to Jerry Brown's national tax proposal.

Meanwhile, the Brown campaign has been advertising, too -- and one of its two spots says that Clinton and President Bush are the choices of powerful insiders in a political system Brown says is rotten.

But the campaign for today's Democratic presidential primary might have been rougher still -- but for the grace of circumstance and, perhaps, strategy.

Here, for example, is part of an advertisement that Democrat Paul Tsongas' campaign had ready to put on the air before it ran out of money and shut down last Thursday; there's no guarantee it would have run, but it was there if deemed necessary:

"This is Paul Tsongas. He's not pretty. He isn't very polished. He's not the guy the Washington insiders want ... Because he doesn't just make promises. He tells the truth. He has ideas to make our economy grow ... Ideas, and the guts to make them stick. He's no Bill Clinton, that's for sure ... He's the exact opposite."

Think of candidates' 30-second commercial spots as arrows, and then think of the arrows being placed in a quiver, ready to shoot -- and you have a pretty good picture of how a presidential campaign operates when it sweeps into a presidential primary state.

Major campaigns will provide stations with tapes of many commercials -- each with a different title and serial number -- before they decide which ones should go on the air. That way, they can decide, on short notice, which of the on-air arrows to pull from the quiver.

The campaign will buy dozens of 30-second advertising spots, and will provide "traffic" instructions to TV stations about which ads to run in those slots. But those instructions can be changed -- and an upbeat "bandwagon" sort of ad can be changed to a sling or an arrow.

The Clinton campaign's quiver of commercials, for example, included at least 10 different spots that it spread among the local

TV stations, according to sources -- even though by Monday it had only run three of them, with two still active.

"Usually, when we roll into a state we have a number of spots that we think we might want to use," said Frank Greer, a Clinton consultant.

Some of Clinton's ads are titled "Triple Play" and "Which" and "For Us" and "People First."

Clinton opened his Connecticut campaign with "For Us," an ad attacking Tsongas and Brown.

"Who's going to fight for us?" the announcer said at its opening. The commercial then dismissed the idea that Brown would fight, claiming Brown's flat-tax proposal would benefit the rich. Then it said Tsongas had proposed "another capital gains tax break for the rich." But then it said only Clinton is "fighting to make the rich pay their fair share."

Tsongas, meanwhile, went on the air last Wednesday with his upbeat "Alone" ad -- showing him swimming the butterfly stroke in a pool as proof his victory over cancer and as a metaphor for a willingness to swim against the political tide.

Even though he ran that non-attack ad, Tsongas had several hard-hitting advertisements ready and sent them to television stations, subject to written notification that they should be unleashed.

This never happened before Tsongas' campaign shut down. Tsongas says he doesn't like negative ads, but still was willing to use them. He used the "he's no Bill Clinton" spot in the Illinois primary campaign this month.

With Tsongas suspending his effort last Thursday, the Clinton campaign quickly changed its instructions to the TV stations. Instead of the "For Us" ad attacking Tsongas and Brown, Clinton began running "People First," an ad that continued through Monday.

"People First" shows Clinton talking with people in several settings about how "we got in trouble in the 1980s" by forgetting to "reward work and family and faith" and rewarding "turning the quick buck."

But Clinton also started a negative ad attacking Brown, titled "Which." It was still running Monday along with "People First." It ends with: "next time Jerry Brown says he's fighting for the people ... ask him which people ... and which Jerry Brown."

Greer was reluctant to say much about his ads, saying, "I'm not going to talk about the intricacies."

For example, he would only talk generally about changes that transformed "Triple Play" -- an ad used in the campaign for last week's Michigan primary -- into "For Us," which was Clinton's opener here.

The two spots were largely the same, although the opening question was different. In "For Us" in Connecticut, the question was "Who's going to fight for us?" In Michigan, home to many laid-off auto workers, the question was "Who's going to fight for working families?"

In Michigan, the ad ended with Clinton's "fighting to make the rich pay their fair share" and "fighting for the forgotten middle class." In the Connecticut ad, Clinton also was fighting "for education, for job training." And, it added, "Bill Clinton ... He'll put people first."

"They are very subtle changes really," said Greer, "It was a matter of refining the message ... It made it a little more

appropriate for Connecticut," he said -- although he would not say how. "The other ad "Triple Play" was tailored for Michigan.